Exploding Construction Animation

[TomD_Arch]

Everyone,

Recently, I have seen some architectural animation sequences where building materials will fly in from off screen to make it look as if the building is being blown together, or built by invisible winds. I have no idea what this technique is called, how it is produced, or what the work-flow is. Does anyone have experience or knowledge of this animation effect, and if so could you point me in the direction of where I might be able to read/study more about this?

[Chris MacDonald]

There are probably quite a few ways of doing it, you could use particles, or keyframes (which would potentially take ages), or the particle bomb (if you're working in max).

[TomD_Arch]

So with a particle bomb I am assuming you would create the animation and then view it reverse to get the effectt of everything coming together in the built assembly?

 

I suppose if you wanted to make the animated assembly sequence happen in a particular order: Concrete columns and slabs slaming down into place, walls flying in and sliding into place within, windows rotating end over end and clipping onto the stucture, etc... you would need to key-frame every piece and animate them individually? Which I can only imagin how tedious this would be if you had, say 200 units of a curtain wall that needed to come into place.

[Scott Schroeder]

Use an animation offset and/or key transfer script. You animate one object, say a wall section unfolding, then instance that wall as many times as you need, finally run the offset script to offset the keys every number of frames. So in reality, you only have to animation each major object only once.

 

If you are going to undertake this task, there are quite a few scripts handy so it doesn't become so tedious.

[Nic H]

its getting on now.

i really hate this look

 

'the building builds itself, woahhwhww'

 

and iv done a fair amount of these.

Edited October 30, 2012 by nicnic

[Fooch]

its getting on now.

i really hate this look

 

'the building builds itself, woahhwhww'

 

and iv done a fair amount of these.

 

 

aww nicnic, just one more.....

[Justin Hunt]

add in a zoom from space shot as well

[Msamir]

This might help Demolition Master ?